The company's statement of direction for Version 7.1 will affect RPG programmers, among others.

IBM announced an interim release of the IBM i operating system this week—6.1.1—and gave highlights on a statement of direction for the next major release in 2010 (Version 7.1) in which it said RPG would start to be "decoupled" from the 5250 data stream.

The announcements were broad and detailed but can be broken down into the following main categories:

• Expanded options for storage consolidation will appeal to SMBs, midrange companies, and enterprise users.  
• Enhanced support for I/O virtualization with PowerVM is designed to reduce costs, increase flexibility, and improve high availability through redundant Virtual I/O Server (VIOS) partitions and N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) support for tape libraries.
• Greatly increased I/O performance will be possible through enhanced support for solid-state drives (SSDs) and associated new technologies.
• New integrated disk solutions and enhanced availability options for RAID configurations as well as support for new I/O devices and options will make it easier and less expensive to ensure data continuity.

The roadmap for the next major release of IBM i, expected sometime in 2010, includes the following objectives:

• Include support for storing and searching XML documents within DB2 and offer enhanced encryption.
• Support asynchronous clustering of internal disk in PowerHA to greatly extend the distance between server and mirrored data.
• Enhance SSD technology to support automatic data assignment to the faster SSD drives.
• Enable RPG to "easily work with a variety of client applications" by moving toward new ways of managing display data, specifically the 5250 data stream.

Increased System Storage Options

MC Press spoke with Craig Johnson, a Power Systems Software manager, who outlined for us the major changes in the interim OS release. Johnson said that among the more important enhancements are the additional system storage options, particularly direct fibre-channel support by IBM i for the DS5100 and DS5300, IBM's inspiring midrange SAN solutions. Providing direct fibre-channel support can result in data speeds of 8 Gbps for these seventh-generation architecture advanced-system storage units, which can scale up to 448 drives. Providing direct support for them helps IBM i customers integrate their data onto one storage platform.

"Over the past couple of years, we've been getting a lot of feedback from our clients about using SANs to consolidate their IBM i, UNIX, and Linux storage," says Johnson. "But if we go back just a couple of years, we would have had only a couple of [direct] options—the DS6800 and the DS8000. We've invested a lot to really extend out the options for our customers." Today, there are a half-dozen or so SAN storage options from which IBM i customers can choose if they want to consolidate their data, now including the SMB-targeted DS5020 through the virtual I/O server (VIOS), and the DS8700, for which support now includes both fibre channel and VIOS.

Redundant VIOS Partitions

Another announcement Johnson cited that users would be interested in is the enhancement in the virtualization capabilities of the OS. "What we're announcing here is that we'll support redundant VIOS partitions," says Johnson. VIOS supplies I/O and other virtualization resources when using PowerVM.

"If you have one i partition connected to two VIOS partitions, if one of the VIOS partitions were to incur a planned—or unplanned—outage, the IBM i partition would continue to run," notes Johnson. "This is an important capability as far as availability for those applications," he says.

N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) Support

IBM i 6.1.1 partitions now support NPIV, an industry-standard virtualization standard. The result will mean enhanced support for IBM System Storage solutions such as tape libraries or disk subsystems. This new feature is expected to appeal to BladeCenter customers in larger systems that wish to back up to tape libraries rather than just a single tape drive. The tape drives that the IBM i BladeCenter currently supports are limited, but Johnson said the main elements of tape support for IBM i on BladeCenter are now in place, though the company will continue to expand the number of supported tape drives.

"We have the backup solution for the small BladeCenter S environments, and now we have a very good backup solution for the larger BladeCenter H," Johnson said. He explained that NPIV applied to the H chassis, since the S chassis is generally deployed in a SAS environment and doesn't use fibre-channel connections.

Solid-State Drives (SSDs)

IBM i has natural built-in features that make it ideal for supporting SSDs, and now it will support them in a SAN or behind VIOS. For those companies that can benefit from SSDs, they can see a dramatic improvement in such jobs as batch runs. "If your I/O is slow, you probably should investigate SSDs," says Johnson. To test whether or not your system could benefit from adding SSDs, IBM has a new tool, the SSD Analyzer Tool for IBM i (V5R4 and V6R1) that users can download here.

New I/O Options

Mid-size clients have an optimal integrated disk solution with a new 380 MB cache SAS disk controller offered in conjunction with a cost-effective 12x-attached PCIe  I/O drawer for 19-inch racks, and a higher-capacity 139 GB SAS SFF disk drive.

Technophiles will be interested in IBM's Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Fibre Channel over Converged Enhanced Ethernet (FCoCEE) technology that allows the consolidation of fibre channel and Ethernet infrastructures.  The technology can save PCI slots by allowing one PCI adapter to replace two other adapters—one Ethernet and one fibre channel. Another term for the FCoE adapter is Converged Network Adapter. The 10 GB FCoE PCIe Dual Port Adapter was announced for POWER6 520, 550, 560, 570, 575, and 595. The network interface card (NIC) traffic functionality is supported by AIX, IBM i, Linux, and VIOS.

IBM i now supports dual SAS adapters, which means you have two adapters, each with its own set of cache going through the same RAID set. If one of the adapters were to incur an outage, the other would continue operating. Hot Spare for Mirroring enables a drive to be automatically substituted for a failed drive in a mirrored pair in 6.1.1 environments.

New i Edition for BladeCenter S

The special edition of IBM i for the BladeCenter S is enhanced with a second configuration option that includes BladeCenter S SAS RAID controller modules and preloaded IBM i. The controller modules provide RAID support for up to 12 disk drives in the IBM BladeCenter S chassis.

User-Defined File System (UDFS)

The IBM i 6.1 Integrated File System (IFS) is enhanced with support for a temporary file system that can improve IFS performance. A new type of user-defined file system (UDFS) has been created for applications that use temporary data on IBM i 6.1. The UDFS can improve IFS performance by up to 80 percent because it eliminates the system overhead that ensures the persistence and protection of permanent objects when they are created. The UDFS can be created, mounted, and used much like a permanent file system.

Performance Data Investigator

The Performance Data Investigator is a tool in IBM i 6.1 that is part of the Web-based Systems Director Navigator for i that can analyze performance data. It has undergone a mild overhaul in 6.1.1 that enhances it with graphical health indicators for system resources such as CPU, disk, and memory.

Statement of Direction

The planned enhancements to the IBM i Version 7.1 operating system can be reiterated exactly as they have been stated by IBM. The statement of direction reads as follows:

• "DB2 XML support and enhanced encryption"
• "PowerHA asynchronous clustering for internal disk"
• "Further automatic exploitation of Solid State Drives"
• "RPG enhancements to easily work with a variety of client applications"

Chris Smith was the Senior News Editor at MC Press Online from 2007 to 2012 and was responsible for the news content on the company's Web site. Chris has been writing about the IBM midrange industry since 1992 when he signed on with Duke Communications as West Coast Editor of News 3X/400. With a bachelor's from the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and minored in Journalism, and a master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chris later studied computer programming and AS/400 operations at Long Beach City College. An award-winning writer with two Maggie Awards, four business books, and a collection of poetry to his credit, Chris began his newspaper career as a reporter in northern California, later worked as night city editor for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and went on to edit a national cable television trade magazine. He was Communications Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach, Calif., before it merged with Boeing, and oversaw implementation of the company's first IBM desktop publishing system there. An editor for MC Press Online since 2007, Chris has authored some 300 articles on a broad range of topics surrounding the IBM midrange platform that have appeared in the company's eight industry-leading newsletters. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..